


Forty Eight

by rapacityinblue



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan)
Genre: Child Abuse, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-04
Updated: 2012-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-28 22:35:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/312923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rapacityinblue/pseuds/rapacityinblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One man's freedom is another's descent into madness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forty Eight

They say when they brought him in the first time he had forty-seven knives distributed among five pockets on his person. Forty-seven, and one of them a carrot peeler, for fuck's sake. Forty-seven. Harleen wondered what happened to them all, if they exploded with the old Gotham PD or --

* * *

In controlled environment experimentation, researchers attempt to use a symbol or constant of the patient's delusions as a trigger, to induce an episode or reaction that can be studied, can provide insights into every patient's unique pathology. Cruel, yes, to induce psychosis, but for the eventual benefit of the patient. Not usually the purview of a resident, even a fourth-year like herself, but she's honored to have been selected to sit on the observation committee.

The room is sterile and white that blinds unsuspecting eyes. Even the one-way mirror is a matte net, opaque. In the center of the room is a white slab made from the same materials as the walls and floor that masquerades as a table.

On the table, shining so dark they hurt to see in all that purity, are three sparkle-sharp switchblades with black hilts to suck up the light.

The only other color in the room is _him._ He paces like a big cat in a zoo; she's seen him do it before. He does it some days when she comes to his cage to listen to his stories and sometimes he sits very still, when he was in a good mood: “I had a teacher when I was getting my baccalaureate – a city employee, if you can imagine, a public servant, and he had a collection, of sorts, you could call it, memorials – every student he'd ever given an A. Believe it or not, I was a lucky one, there was a man's ear in that box, a girl's scalp, too – but all he wanted from me was a tiny little sliver of skin. Scrapings, really. And this was at Gotham City College – don't you go there, Harls?”

But some days, the days when he was hot or tired, the days he got cranky he moved like the floor of his cage conducted energy: “My grandfather, well, he was not a nice man. Not a nice man at all, Harls, and he had a dog. Lived with him for sixteen years, this dog, like it was trying to live forever and doing well so far, and this dog had a trick my grandfather particularly liked where they'd wrestle rough, you know, and the dog could swallow his entire hand, pretend to eat it. So one day I'm coming home from school on my bike and the dog takes after me, chasing me, I don't think much of it. And I zoom out into the street, seeing if I can make it before the truck flattens me, and I do but that dog, he doesn't. Old bones finally catching up with him. And you'd think, the way my grandfather reacted, that he'd lost his best friend and not just a dog, and he said, since you killed him you can be him now. Only I was ten and my mouth was too small, so some minor alterations --”

And that, maybe, is why she's in the room here now, because she knows him better than anyone, knows his moods, reads the laughter in the set of his shoulders as he finishes the perimeter of the room and crosses the table to the center. It's true that she's spent more accumulated hours than anyone with him – that includes interns, other residents, nurses and doctors – he responds to her, they say, responds to treatment with her.

He picks up the first knife to flick it open then closed, letting it weave through his fingers the way her daddy did with coins or toothpicks or whatever was at hand, passing it from pinky to thumb and up and over again. Then, never letting it drop, he flips the other into his left hand and starts the same movement there, too, grinning like a show. Next thing they're all open, flying in the air one at a time and she remembers he can juggle: (“Have you ever been to the circus, Harls? Have you ever seen those men who put their head in the lion's mouth, who snarl back and make the lions cower in the corners of the ring? Do you know how they do it? They do it because they're scarier than the lions, because they were taught how to be when they were little. My family were carnies, you see, part of the freak show, but they wanted me to do something more, they apprenticed me out. There's only one way to make yourself scarier than a lion, Harley-girl.”)

The first knife hits the mirror with a thud and they all jump, even the young intern taking over Doctor Crane's research. But the glass holds and she breathes again as he saunters over, retrieves the blade and starts flinging them through the air again.

When the second goes wild, he stares right through the opaqued window and meets her eyes like he can see her through the glass. The second knife buries itself in the ceiling.

He's got two left in his hands, now, and his thumbs move over them like caresses. (“Do you want to know why I use a knife? It's the pride of the matter. A gun is cold. Sure, you clean it now and then but you can leave it in pieces, use it and throw it in a pocket or a car trunk. There's no love between a man and his gun, Harls, but a knife--”) The first knife, the one he threw at the window, slides from his fingers to the ground. Harmless. The last one he holds in both hands like a baby, careful to support it's head, before he flicks it up. (“--a knife takes care. Has to be cleaned, oiled, left to rest in a sheath. Can't let any blood dry on it or you'll have a useless pile of rust, can't let it sit out in the rain or fall into the john. Oh, Harley-girl--”) and forty-seven of them, each one loved, cleaned, cared for. A kind of commitment most people give their pets, or fine wines. He has the third knife, which is really the forty-eighth, she thinks dizzily, with the flat of the blade pressed to the corner of his mouth like a pout, He quirks it up, a smile. Pout, smile, pout – he is trying, she realizes, to make her laugh, and she feels the smile crack across her face.

He does too, wraps his tongue around the tip of the blade. It comes away red and flicks out to paint his lips, touching up his makeup. She glances at the doctors around her, every one of them watching the show, her show, with sick fascination, and permits herself a small squirm. The edge of the blade moves down, over his chin, his neck, so light she can't tell if the red trailing after it is a fresh cut or just residue from before. She crosses her legs at the thigh, high up and tight where the muscles push back against her torso.

“Enough,” snaps Dr. Murphy when the tip reaches his pulse. “He's playing games. Gas him, get him back in his cell. We don't have time for this.” The intern nods and presses the button to begin circulating the oneirogenic compound into the room's controlled atmosphere.

Even the Joker looks surprised when they first hear a hiss, then a whistle, and the second knife – the one he lodged in the ceiling – comes hurtling from the gas main to lie on the floor beside the blade he dropped. As the pressure continues to build in the warped conduit he looks smug, and as it explodes back into the control room the last thing she sees, before her world goes back, is those lips, smeared with his own blood and the makeup they award him for good behavior, puckered in a kiss. (“--Harley-Harley-Harley girl, a knife is a commitment. It's a relationship, a promise. What cops do, what the Batman does, doesn't matter because it's transient, but a knife – a knife's got weight.”)

* * *

When she wakes up, comes home that night, she'll find the third switchblade, the blood still drying on its tip, pinning the card to her door.

* * *

Interns at Arkham Asylum didn't do much other than fold towels and empty bedpans and deliver meals, even interns in their fourth year of med school like Harleen Quinzel. In fact, students at Gotham City College (like Harleen) in the school's pre-residency internship program (like Harleen) didn't get to choose the hospital where they studied in their final year. Placement was determined through random lottery.

Fourteen students from Harleen's class were assigned to Arkham. Two dropped out the next day. Another eight quit over the two weeks.

Harleen lasted twenty two days, long enough to hear the ghost stories about dead patients, about the experiments of the lamented Dr. Crane, about the man who'd come to Arkham with forty-seven knives in his pockets. She lasted until the day the senior nurse sent her to retrieve dinner trays from the maximum security ward. There was only one cell in the maximum security ward.

She stared at the man behind the glass for a very long time. He stared back, his eyes rimmed with ebony, his skin white except for where the wrinkles expelled the chalky makeup. The bones from a baked chicken were piled haphazardly on his dinner tray in the far corner of the cage which she couldn't rightly call a cell.

When she shifted her focus on his face, she could see the downward set of his lips, then she blinked and saw only the red-gash grin. Like the picture of the beautiful young lady an the old hag, one or the other but never both at once. All the silverware from the meal was piled in the still-full coffee cup and balanced atop the precarious pile of bone and gristle like an art piece. Except for the knife. From the corner of the full full red lips he dangled a butter knife like her daddy used to balance cigarettes.

“Hey~lo, cutie,” he said to her stare, and the knife slipped down from his face, forgotten. She didn't know if she was looking at the hag or the lady. “Would you like to know how I got these scars?”


End file.
